Wallander writer Henning Mankell dies - BBC News BBC News Wallander writer Henning Mankell dies 5 October 2015 Image caption The writer was diagnosed with cancer in early 2014 Swedish crime writer Henning Mankell, best known for his Wallander series, has died aged 67. The author discovered he had cancer last year, and wrote about the experience in his last book, Quicksand: What It Means To Be A Human Being. His best-selling novels, which follow policeman Kurt Wallander through Sweden and Mozambique, were turned into a TV drama starring Sir Kenneth Branagh. Sir Kenneth paid tribute, calling the author "a fine writer and a fine man". He was the third actor to play the irascible detective. In Mankell's home country, both Rolf Lassgard and Krister Henriksson played the role. BBC Four screened the latter version in the UK. Image caption Sir Kenneth Branagh plays Wallander in the English-language version In a statement, Sir Kenneth said: "In life and in art Henning Mankell was a man of passionate commitment. I will miss his provocative intelligence and his great personal generosity.

Aside from his stringent political activism, and his decades of work in Africa, he also leaves an immense contribution to Scandinavian literature. "His loving family, and those privileged to know him, together with readers from all over the world, will mourn a fine writer and a fine man." Born in February 1948, Mankell wrote dozens of plays, novels, children's books and screenplays. But it was for his Wallander series that he was most renowned. The rumpled and gloomy detective got his name when Mankell ran his finger through a telephone directory, but went on to sell more than 40 million books. 'More popular' Mankell's life and career were shaped by the divorce of his parents when he was just two years old. He lived with his father, a judge, and barely saw his mother until he was 15. I will miss his provocative intelligence and his great personal generosity Kenneth Branagh When the family moved to a remote town in the north of Sweden, the young Mankell immersed himself in books, reading extensively about Africa, and learned that imagination could be an instrument of survival, not just of creativity.

"In my mind I created another mother for myself to replace the one who had left," he once said. "And I think this was me at my best, when the forces of imagination had the same value as the real world." Unimpressed by school, he left at the age of 16 to join the merchant navy, becoming a stevedore labourer on a Swedish ship carrying coal and iron ore. Two years later, he set up home in Paris, barely scraping a living ("I don't know how I survived," he said) but thriving on the student activism and political debate After a year and a half, he returned to Stockholm to work as a stagehand. There, aged 20, he wrote his first play, The Amusement Park, about Swedish colonial interests in 19th Century South America. His debut novel, The Stone-Blaster, soon followed. Kurt Wallander first appeared in 1989's Faceless Killers, investigating a murder in which the only clue is that the perpetrators appear to have been foreigners. When that information was leaked to the public, it triggered a series of racially-motivated attacks, explored in the book through the themes of racism and national identity in Sweden.

At first, the author was unaware he had created a recurring character, "but then I realised after two or three novels that I had this… instrument who could be useful". Speaking to the Telegraph in 2011, he said : "I wanted to show how difficult it is to be a good police officer. But after, I think, the third novel, I spoke to this friend of mine and asked what sort of disease I could give him. Without hesitating, she said: 'Diabetes!' So I gave him diabetes and that made him more popular. "I mean, you could never imagine James Bond giving himself a shot of insulin, but with Wallander it seemed perfectly natural." Image copyright Reuters Image caption Among his accolades, Mankell received the Gold Dagger Award; the Astrid Lindgren Prize and the Erich-Maria-Remarque Peace Award (pictured) Although he became known as a leading proponent of "Scandi Crime", Mankell was not a fan of genre fiction.

"I could never write a crime story just for the sake of it, because I always want to talk about certain things," he said, citing Macbeth as the best crime story he had ever read, and John Le Carre as a key influence. "He investigates the contradictions inside man, between men, and between man and society; and I hope to do the same," he told The Guardian. Sir Kenneth tried to bring the same gravitas to his TV portrayal of the detective. "We're not taking lightly the idea of people being murdered," he told the BBC in 2010 . "Wallander demands that he and his colleagues care and the drama invites the audience to do the same." 'Catastrophe' Throughout his adult life, Mankell divided his time between Sweden and Mozambique, where he ran a theatre company and devoted time to the fight against Aids. He was active in the "memory books" project, which encourages parents with HIV to record their stories, not just for their children but for future generations. Shortly after New Year 2014, the author went to see an orthopaedic surgeon in Stockholm with what he assumed was a slipped disc.

But tests revealed a tumour in his lung, another in his neck, and evidence the cancer had spread throughout his body. "It was a catastrophe for me," he told US radio station NPR last year . "Everything that was normal to me up to that point was gone all of a sudden. No one had died of cancer in my family. I had always assumed I'd die of something else." His survivors include his wife of 17 years, Eva Bergman - the daughter of Ingmar Bergman's second wife, the dancer Ellen Lundstrom - and his son, Jon Mankell, a film producer who helped bring Stieg Larsson's Girl With The Dragon Tattoo series to the big screen. Henning Mankell: the last Wallander | Books | The Guardian Henning Mankell Henning Mankell: the last Wallander Forget the 40 plays, the Gaza flotilla arrest and the good work in Africa, what Henning Mankell is really famous for is the anguished detective he created 22 years ago. Now, with the final Wallander novel published this week, he tells Jon Henley why he is happy to say farewell Henning Mankell.

Photograph: Murdo Macleod Tuesday 22 March 2011 16.29 EDT First published on Tuesday 22 March 2011 16.29 EDT Share on Messenger Close That's it then; the end. Twenty-two years after his first appearance and more than a decade since the one everybody - even his creator - had assumed would be his last, Inspector Kurt Wallander is working his last case. The lugubrious, all too human but ultimately decent Swedish cop with the never-ending health problems and the terrible family life has sold 30m books in 45 different languages. This will be a sad day for a lot of people. But not, on balance, for Henning Mankell . "Hand on heart," he says, "I thought I'd written his last adventure a long time ago. I don't even particularly like the man. We have certain things in common: we enjoy the same kind of music, we have a similarly conscientious approach to work. We wouldn't be enemies if we knew each other, but he wouldn't be a close friend.

He's not someone I'd invite to dinner." We're in the sunlit kitchen of the house Mankell owns with his wife Eva in old Antibes, in the south of France. Coffee and cakes from the local patisserie are on the table. Eva, a successful theatre director in Sweden and daughter of Ingmar Bergman, disappears upstairs to work. Mankell, rumpled and relaxed in T-shirt and black tracksuit of uncertain vintage and indiscriminate design, listens gravely and answers precisely. The Troubled Man, his 10th and final Wallander novel, is published here this week. There was, he says, another one, many years ago: it would have been the fifth in the series, but it was about child abuse and was too depressing; he burned it after 100 pages. This one started to germinate four or five years ago, with the idea "not that Wallander would solve a case, but that he would himself be the case, as it were". The trigger, really, was turning 60 (Mankell is now 63). It makes a man think. "When you reach your 60s, you realise certain things," he says.

"First, that you've lived well over half your life. Second, that you've pretty much made all your really big decisions; people very rarely change direction after that. And that leads you to look back. It's quite a . . . scary moment. So I asked: am I afraid of anything? I'm not afraid of dying. Nor of pain; we can control most pain these days. But there is one thing I'm scared of." The thing Mankell is scared of is the reason this is Wallander's last case, so obviously I'm not going to tell you what it is. But thinking about that, and about the whole business of looking back on a life, and the idea of Wallander realising how all along he had been so resolutely non-political, then wondering what might happen if you confronted him with perhaps the biggest political scandal in Sweden's postwar history – thinking about all those things, Mankell says, "I began to think I really might have a story for Wallander.

One last one." In The Troubled Man, Wallander – familiar these days not just to readers but TV viewers too, through both Kenneth Branagh's crumpled, world-worn interpretation and the even more morose and fallible vision offered by Krister Henriksson in the Swedish original - is, indeed, 60, nearing his career's end. He has a dog and a house in the country and becomes, to his delight, a grandfather: his daughter Linda has a baby. But when the child's other grand-father, a retired senior naval officer, disappears, the detective, dogged now by increasingly worrying lapses of concentration and memory, is dragged into perhaps his most far-reaching case: an investigation that will take him back to the dark days of the cold war and a string of unexplained incursions into Swedish waters that could yet sink a few big political careers. The case forces Wallander to reassess his life, and to revisit – often with upsetting consequences - some of the characters who have featured in it. The Troubled Man is a first-rate whodunnit. But it's also a quiet, considered and respectful farewell; a meditation on a life honestly if imperfectly lived.

Don't, though, get the wrong idea. "Wallander and I share the same age, more or less," Mankell concedes, "and we have some of the same traits – I too now feel an urge to find out what's happened to my friends of 40 years ago, for example. See what's become of them. It's true, I suppose, that I have never been as close as I am in this book to certain of the ideas and thoughts and worries that Wallander has." But there are some significant differences. "I have no problem turning round and looking back," he says, firmly. "Wallander does. He has certain things to fear and to regret; I don't. There's honestly very little in my life I regret; maybe three or four years, when I foolishly accepted an invitation to be general manager of a theatre in Sweden. It stopped me writing. But that's all. Not bad in nearly 65 years, I think." Mankell was born in Stockholm in February 1948. His mother left when he was barely one; he was brought up by his elder sister and his father, a judge, in the remote village of Sveg in the far north.

His grandmother taught him to read and write: "I can still remember," he says, "putting one word after another, for the first time, and making a sentence. And then another. And then making a story. I have never really thought of doing anything else." He realised intuitively and quite soon, he says, that he had a talent for storytelling. "The powers of imagination are without limit, especially as a child," he says. "We are created in such a way that the only thing we don't need is our appendix: if we didn't need an imagination, we wouldn't have one." Mankell's imagination was so powerful that by the time he met his mother again, as a teenager in Stockholm, "I preferred the one I'd created in my mind. She was tough, mind you. Not a pushover. But I preferred her to the real one." School bored him and at 15 he was a merchant seaman, "a wonderful year of hard work and learning how to live. My university. The only disappointment was that I'd dreamed of sailing to Liberia, Rhode Island, even Rotterdam, but somehow it was always Middlesbrough.

Fifteen times." Then there was Paris, where he arrived one January afternoon, "with 200 francs and a terrible toothache. I still remember it, the pain, knowing no one, having nowhere to go." He survived by cleaning and repairing clarinets, a job he reckons he could still do blindfold. At 17 he was back in Sweden, working in the theatre. "I realised what I was writing wasn't very good," he says, "so I got a job as a director's assistant, to learn what made a story work." It didn't take long: his first play was bought when he was 19. Mankell asked if he could direct it, and was given a fortnight to try. The management liked what they saw; at any rate, they kept him on. "I discovered," Mankell says, "that writing and directing for the theatre was quite well paid: I could do a play, then spend seven months writing a book." His first novel was published four years later. It's a balance he has maintained ever since: 40 plays, nearly as many novels and children's books. "It's a very . . . complete life," he says.

"I close the door, I sit in an empty room, I write. Then I open the door, and suddenly there are people, in a theatre." If he had to choose, writing rather than directing would win the day – but plays, not novels. "In a book, you have to say everything," he says. "In a play, you have to leave space for the actors; write as little as possible. It's a challenge." Books, he says, he writes on the computer. Plays he writes by hand; the computer "goes too fast". There's another important source of equilibrium in Mankell's carefully counterpoised life: Africa. Six months of the year, most years, he lives in Maputo, where he writes and directs for Mozambique's first professional theatre, Teatro Avenida, a thriving institution he has helped build from scratch over a quarter of a century. Mankell first pitched up in Africa, in Guinea-Bissau, aged barely 20, seeking simply "to see the world".

(He'd been dreaming of Africa ever since he'd first read of it, in books as a small child: "There was this frozen river in the far north of Sweden," he says, "with a few logs stuck in it. For me it was the Congo, and they were crocodiles.") Besides the theatre, Mankell does a lot of charity work in Africa, including a project called Memory Books, which helps parents dying of Aids to record something of themselves in a book, to be passed to their children when they go. "I was in a small village outside Kampala, Uganda, years ago now," Mankell says. "It had only very young and very old. Everyone in between had died. There was a small girl who showed me a folded scrap of paper in her hand, and in it was pressed a dead blue butterfly. She said her mother had loved blue butterflies. That was one of the most important books I've ever read." So every year he goes back to Africa, and he's convinced it has made him a better European, certainly a better writer, perhaps even a better person. "One foot in the snow, one foot in the dust," he says.

"I've learned a lot, seeing the world from outside this European egocentricity. It's taught me so much about the human condition. It's been difficult, dangerous sometimes, but it has helped me understand a lot more about the world." Inspector Kurt Wallander, as it happens, was born after one such African sojourn. It was 1987, and Mankell was returning to Sweden after a long time away. "I sensed there was something happening," he says. "A danger of racism, xenophobia. And since those would be criminal acts, I realised I needed to write a crime novel. And since it was a crime novel, it needed a policeman. I took his name from the phone book. But the impulse, the inspiration, was always the question: the issue at hand. Not the character." Crime writing, he came to realise, was not – as everyone had always told him – a literary genre that was invented by Poe or Hammett or even by Shakespeare. "It was around in classical drama," he says. "Even then, we were holding up a mirror to crime to observe society. Look at Medea: a woman murders her kids because she's jealous of her husband.

If that's not a crime story, I don't know what is. And if the ancient Greeks had had a police force, you can be damn sure a detective inspector would have had a part in Medea. Society and its contradictions become clear when you write about crime." Wallander took off almost instantly in Scandinavia, and nearly as fast in continental Europe. Britain, after a slower start, is catching up, carried on a wave of Scandi-crime enthusiasm that also features the likes of Stieg Larsson, Jo Nesbø and Detective Sarah Lund. Wallander, though, retains a special appeal. What is it? Partly, Mankell reckons, that he has never instrumentalised the detective. "Everything has always started from a big question, not from within Wallander," he says. "I did sometimes use him, of course. But I never held him between my fingers and looked at him and said: So, what can I find out with you today? I'd written three novels with him before I realised this was . . . like a cello, that I could play." It's also important that Wallander is real. "No one could imagine James Bond stopping to inject himself with insulin," Mankell says.

"That's because James Bond isn't real. So it's important that Wallander has diabetes, he's ill, his ideas progress, he has relationship problems. He changes, like we all do." It helps, too, that he thinks: "It's challenging to have him enter a room and think for 10 pages. But that's what I'm interested in – how he reads facts, traces, situations. Running around and shooting people is easy. And it isn't normal. Normally you solve problems by thinking." He isn't, though, gloomy: "He's a passionate man. His problem with women is that he still loves his wife, passionately. And he has humour, and irony. Yes, he's sometimes down. But I think we'd all be down if we had to face what he has to face. And there's something in the setting, plainly: the bleak landscapes of Skåne, on the outermost edge of Sweden, "our Rio Grande; closest to the continent, where people are different". And in the fact that Ystad, Wallander's beat, is a neat, well-ordered provincial town.

He's dismissive, though, of one frequent foreign explanation for Wallander's success: violent crime erupting in what the rest of us like to think of as a social-democratic paradise. "It was you who built up that image of Sweden, not us," he says. "Just like you built up an image of blonde Scandinavian girls. Look, Sweden is a very decent society. But you outside Sweden have created a sort of myth of it as a perfect society, paradise on earth. We never believed that. For us, yes, mistakes have been made in the past 20 years. But this idea that the murder of [former prime minister] Olof Palme, in 1986, was somehow the beginning of the end for Sweden . . . We didn't lose our innocence with his death. Politics would have followed the same course. Market liberalism would have happened." But now Wallander has reached the end of his road. Would Mankell, prolific and hugely successful for over 40 years, be happy for the rumpled detective to be his greatest legacy? He thinks. "I believe," he says, "the most important thing you do in your life, you may not even know what it is.

It may be that one day you sat down on a bench to comfort someone who is crying. That could be the most important thing you ever do. So no, I would like to be thought of as a good, and quite generous man, who tried to make life a little better for others through what he did. And the things he wrote." Because doing is what really matters. That's why Mankell was on board the Sophia, part of the convoy of Gaza-bound aid boats stormed by Israeli commandos last May; nine activists were killed. But he prefers, he says, to call himself an intellectual, not an activist, because "an intellectual's job is to take responsibility, and actions prove the word". He's quite prepared to go on a new flotilla: "You have to act, not just by writing, but by standing up and doing. For me, you cannot call yourself an intellectual if all you use your intellectual gifts for is to find excuses not to do anything. Which, sadly, is what I think a lot of intellectuals do." Wallander: Swede dreams are made of this | The Independent Features Wallander: Swede dreams are made of this Kenneth Branagh's 'Wallander' captivated TV viewers.

Now, as BBC4 shows the Scandinavian original, Geoffrey Macnab examines their different emphases on detectives, darkness and alienation Thursday 30 July 2009 23:00 BST Click to follow The Independent Culture Anyone wanting to play Inspector Wallander has to pass the soiled-underwear test. There is a revealing passage in Faceless Killers, the first of Henning Mankell's Kurt Wallander crime novels, in which the Swedish writer describes his permanently exhausted, world-weary detective bolting down a hamburger so quickly that it gives him diarrhoea. "As he sat on the toilet he noticed that he ought to change his underwear," Mankell writes, providing his readers with just a little more detail than they probably want or need, but also making it very clear that Wallander isn't one of those glib, telegenic detectives who never has to worry about indigestion, needy relatives or tax returns. BBC4's decision to broadcast several episodes of the hit Swedish Wallander series has given British audiences the chance to compare and contrast Wallanders. How does the original, local, Swedish series stand up to the award-winning detective dramas starring Kenneth Branagh?

"They are quite different," the series' Swedish producer Ole Sondberg says. "Where they're really different is that Branagh really focused on the dark side of the character, whereas if you see the Swedish series, we are trying to achieve more humour, more lightness, We were very afraid that the character would be too dark." Both Branagh and Krister Henriksson, who plays the detective in the original Swedish series, look as if they would probably pass the underwear test. They've gone to great lengths to cultivate plenty of stubble and red rings under their eyes, suggesting that they neither get much sleep nor have much time to devote to personal hygiene. In "Sidetracked", the first episode of the British Wallander, the detective is visited by his daughter. Separated from his wife, he is living in a cluttered, messy apartment. "God, this place is squalid," the daughter exclaims. Henriksson's Wallander is dark-haired, slimmer and not quite as unkempt as Branagh. He is a devotee of opera music, which is just how Mankell describes him.

(There is no Verdi in the Branagh version, apparently on the grounds that listening to classical music would make him too much like Inspector Morse, whose spiritual heir he seems to be – at least in the eyes of the commissioning editors.) The irony is that the Swedish Wallander plays much more like a traditional British detective drama than its British counterpart. Henriksson plays him as a detective in the mould of Taggart: a dour, taciturn figure, albeit with a morbid sense of humour and an underlying humanity. Confronted with a seemingly motiveless double murder, in which one of the victims was his childhood sweetheart, in "The Brothers", he and his team probe away patiently for clues. His own emotions don't cloud his professionalism. One trait immediately apparent is his liberalism. He deplores the kneejerk racism of some of his compatriots, especially those among the wealthy elite. The British Wallander is far more stylised and cinematic in conception. It lacks the sense of local identity that characterises the Swedish version. Given that it was made in Sweden by British actors and technicians, this was probably inevitable.

The programme-makers try to bolster their Swedish credentials by referring to the assassination of Olaf Palme and including lines like "the world now recognises that Sweden stands for a little more than just Björn Borg, Abba and a bit of skinny-dipping in mountain lakes." Even so, when all the actors, whether they're playing cops or criminals, speak English with the same neutral, middle-class BBC-style accent, it never seems that we are really experiencing life on the streets of Ystad ("a nest of pirates and fraudsters," as Strindberg once described it.) The stylised quality is intensified by Anthony Dod Mantle's brilliant but idiosyncratic cinematography. Dod Mantle, who has worked closely with maverick film-makers like Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg, shot the Wallander dramas using the Red One digital camera. The visual effect is striking. Often, in TV detective dramas, the emphasis is on close-ups. We see the hairs in Ken Stott's nostrils or on John Thaw's furrowed brow looming out of the small screen as the sleuth wrestles with the latest mystery.

In Wallander, as shot by Dod Mantle, attention isn't just concentrated on the sweaty landscape of the detective's face. We also see spectacular sequences of fields and cityscapes. For example, during the very first moments of "Sidetracked", we see a young girl fleeing through a field of yellow, head-high crops before setting herself on fire in front of Wallander. Branagh's performance is fascinating, if very over-determined. He first met Mankell during the Ingmar Bergman Week on the island of Faro in the summer of 2007. At times, his Wallander seems less like a hard-bitten Swedish detective than the anguished priest played by Gunnar Bjornstrand in Bergman's Winter Light. Just as that priest is struggling with his faith, Branagh's detective is in similar conflict about his profession. Each fresh crime he encounters takes a huge psychic toll on him. Branagh has talked of "the ongoing empathy, the open-wound quality" that Wallander has developed in the face of all the suffering he has seen.

He is not the typical hard-bitten detective in a police procedural drama who reacts to each new crime, however grotesque, as if it is just in a day's work. Audiences in Sweden, Britain and elsewhere, respond to Wallander because he does seem such a vulnerable and grounded figure. He is a middle-aged man whose life is always at risk of falling apart. The detective is estranged from his wife and has a tempestuous relationship with both his daughter and his elderly father. In the wake of the success of the Wallander TV dramas and of the Stieg Larsson film adaptation, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (made by the same production company), there has been much speculation about why the world is currently so obsessed with Scandinavian crime fiction. Is it the light? Is it the long winters, or the tendency toward introspection? Is it the interior design? The irony, as far as Ole Sondberg is concerned, is that, in the Swedish Wallander, there has been a self-conscious attempt to introduce more humour and to escape from the stereotype of gloomy Swedes. He suggests that the two series work best in very different markets.

For example, the US has no interest in the Swedish Wallander whereas the much darker Branagh version has done extremely well with American audiences. Arguably, the success of the Mankell and Larsson books isn't really to do with Sweden at all. The themes and characters have a universality of appeal. These are stories as much about the personal lives of their characters as the crimes they are ostensibly investigating. In The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, the detective is a rebellious young woman who dresses like a punk. In Wallander, it's a dysfunctional middle-aged man. Both have a crusading quality about them. For all the stresses in their domestic lives, they're relentless when pursuing a new case. Mankell has given the British version of Wallander his blessing. What he liked was precisely that it wasn't a carbon copy of the Swedish series. "After 15 seconds, I knew these guys are going in their own direction," he said after first watching the Branagh version. Yellow Bird, the Swedish production company behind the Wallander TV series, hasn't discounted the possibility of a big-screen version. "Nothing is out of the question," Sondberg says.

In the meantime, three more Branagh Wallanders are being filmed in Sweden this summer. There are also some fresh Swedish Wallanders on the way. All the evidence suggests there is room for both. Rather than one series eclipsing its rival, they seem to have enhanced each other's visibility. For now, at least, Branagh and Krister Henriksson look set to march hand in hand. The world can't get enough of crusty, world-weary Swedish cops with personal-hygiene issues. It doesn't seem to matter which language they speak. More about: Inspector-Wallander.org: Other Swedish Authors Other Nordic Authors This page is very much a work in progress. If you enjoy Henning Mankell's crime fiction, you might enjoy novels from some of Scandinavia's other top writers. Here's a short list of authors who have been recommended by people on the Inspector Wallander mailing list. Another great place to learn about Nordic authors are the German crime websites - two good ones are Krimi Couch and Schweden Krimi . Even if you don't understand German, you can browse through their list of authors and then look those names up at an English-language bookshop.

Additional suggestions are welcome so please email us with authors that you like. If you would like to write a short blurb about an author's work, send it to use and we will try to get it posted. Sweden Maj Sjöwall & Per Wahlöö The husband and wife writing team responsible for the classic Swedish police procedural series featuring Inspector Martin Beck. Henning Mankell's Kurt Wallander novels are considered by many to be a spiritual successor to the Beck series. Recommended by Emerson: I've found "Cop Killer" to be one of the best, but you need to have a better handle on the characters to get the full impact of the book. (It's the ninth in the series.) I started completely out of chronological order with "The Laughing Policeman," which is a good one. However, I have to side with others I've read on the 'Net and recommend "Roseanna" for a first-timer, although "The Laughing Policeman" or "The Man Who Went Up In Smoke" would be a good second read.

After that, try either "Cop Killer" or "The Fire Engine That Disappeared." Camilla Läckberg's top 10 Swedish crime novels | Books | The Guardian Top 10s Camilla Läckberg's top 10 Swedish crime novels There seems to be an endless supply of great Swedish crime writers. One of the latest northern stars to be translated, Camilla Läckberg, here picks out her own strongest suspects Bleak outlook ... a burial ground on Kurt Wallander's beat in Ystad. Photograph: Alexander Benz/Corbis Camilla Läckberg Share on Messenger Close Born in 1974, Camilla Läckberg began her working life as an economist, but a course in creative crime writing set her on a fresh track that six books later has established her in the front rank of Swedish crime writers. Her mysteries, all set in her tiny home town of Fjällbacka, have all been number one bestsellers in Sweden. The Preacher is the latest of her novels to become available in English translation. Buy The Preacher at the Guardian bookshop Scandinavian crime fiction has become a great success all across the world and rightfully so.

Sjöwall & Wahlöö ushered in a whole generation of Swedish crime writers, many of whom are now available in English. I think ours is a tradition that has much in common with English crime writing: there's a very similar care for setting, characters, and psychology. These are some of my favourites – I hope some of them will become yours. 1. The Mind's Eye by Håkan Nesser Nesser sets his stories in a fictional country that's not quite Sweden, but the people in them are very, very real. He used to be a school teacher before becoming a writer, and it shows in the meticulous way he handles his texts. But yet his writing never feels cold or static – there's heart in everything he writes and you find yourself understanding and sympathising with some real villains. 2. Blackwater by Kerstin Ekman Loosely based on a true story, this is dark, sinister and wonderfully written. It's been a hugely popular book for many years in Sweden, with an appeal that extends to readers who don't usually touch thrillers. A real classic. 3.

Missing by Karin Alvtegen Karin Alvtegen is the master at psychological suspense, and her plots unfold themselves naturally from the character studies. No one does this better than Alvtegen, and her homeless murder suspect, Sybilla, is one of crime fiction's most memorable characters. 4. Sun Storm by Åsa Larsson Northern Sweden holds a special kind of magic. It's cold, lonely, and the people are tough and silent, or so the stereotype says. This is Åsa Larsson's home turf and I find as much joy in reading her closely observed descriptions of the environment, as in following her intriguing plots. And I love the fact that the heroine in her books is a tax attorney. 5. The Fifth Woman by Henning Mankell Inspector Wallander has become a household name along with the little town of Ystad where he pursues most of his cases. But Mankell's range is far from parochial. Drawing on his own experience living both in Sweden and in Africa, this tale of a serial killer takes us around Congo as well as Ystad. 6.

Unseen by Mari Jungstedt Emma and Johan, the intriguing couple caught up in this murderous plot, are characters to really fall in love with, and combined with the picturesque environment of Gotland, and a great plot, you've got a book to cherish. Mari is also not only a colleague but a close friend of mine, and we love talking about murder methods, forensics and criminal psychology over dinner. 7. Shame by Karin Alvtegen Another winner from Alvtegen, this book really touched me. She often has a theme based on human nature and shortcomings in her books - and this book is a searing portrait of someone bearing the shame of being unloved. 8. Echoes from the Dead by Johan Theorin Johan is a relative newcomer to crime fiction, but has already really carved out his own niche, which blends the murder mystery with the ghost story. It's so spooky, I could never read this one at night! 9. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson Fiction like nothing else, Larsson's books offer the unusual experience of serious, character-driven writing that also provides helter skelter action. Buckle up before you start reading! 10.

Midvinterblod by Mons Kallentoft (not yet translated) Mons came to crime fiction relatively late, after three other books including Food Noir, a collection of groundbreaking essays on food and travel. As well as a terrific plot, this book also has one of the best-realised female heroines I've read by a male writer. It's not yet translated into English, but it really should be. Wallander Clip - YouTube Wallander Clip Want to watch this again later? Sign in to add this video to a playlist. Need to report the video? Sign in to report inappropriate content. The interactive transcript could not be loaded. Loading... Rating is available when the video has been rented. This feature is not available right now. Please try again later. Published on Sep 3, 2013 Wallander (1994 Swedish Film Series) Kurt Wallander is a fictional police inspector created by Swedish crime writer Henning Mankell. In the novels, Inspector Wallander solves shocking murders with his colleagues. The novels have an underlying question: "What went wrong with Swedish society?". The series has won many awards, including the German Crime Prize and the British 2001 CWA Gold Dagger for Sidetracked.

The ninth book, The Pyramid, is a prequel: a collection of 5 novellas (Kurt Wallander's First Case, The Man With The Mask, The Man On The Beach, The Death Of The Photographer, The Pyramid) about Kurt Wallander's past, with the last one ending just before the start of Faceless Killers. 10 years after The Pyramid, Henning Mankell published another Inspector Wallander novel, The Troubled Man, which he said would definitely be the last in the series. Living and working in the town of Ystad, 56 kilometers south-east of the city of Malmö, in the southern province of Skåne, which is in the southern tip of Sweden, Inspector Wallander has been portrayed on screen and television by actors Rolf Lassgård, Krister Henriksson and Kenneth Branagh. Wallander (Swedish Film Series) Between 1994 and 2007, all 9 of Henning Mankell's Inspector Wallander novels were adapted into films for Swedish television SVT starring Rolf Lassgård as Inspector Kurt Wallander.

In the UK, the films were broadcast on BBC Four from 11 December 2010 to 18 August 2012, subtitled in English. Wallander (Swedish TV Series) Krister Henriksson played the title role of Inspector Kurt Wallander in this version. The 1st series of 13 films was produced in 2005 and 2006, with one taken directly from a novel and the remainder with new storylines suggested by Henning Mankell. The 2nd series of 13 films was shown between 2009 and 2010. Three films Before The Frost (#1), Mastermind (#6), and The Secret (#13) premiered in cinemas, with the rest first released as direct-to-DVD films. The first episode of the second series, Hämnden (The Revenge), was released in Swedish cinemas in January 2009; the rest of the series was made for television. A third and final series, containing six 90-minute episodes, will air in 2013 with Charlotta Jonsson as Linda Wallander.

The first episode, adapted from the novel The Troubled Man, was released in cinemas in January 2013. The BBC aired all 26 episodes of the Swedish television versions on BBC Four with English subtitles.6 December 2008 19 June 2010 Wallander (UK TV series) In the British adaptation of Henning Mankell's novels, Kenneth Branagh starred as the eponymous police inspector Kurt Wallander, which is the first time the Inspector Wallander novels have been adapted into an English-language production, simply entitled Wallander. The first 3-episode series, produced by Yellow Bird, Left Bank Pictures and TKBC for BBC Scotland, was broadcast on BBC One from 30 November to 14 December 2008. Yellow Bird, formed by Henning Mankell, began negotiations with British companies to produce the adaptations in 2006. In 2007, Kenneth Branagh met with Henning Mankell to discuss playing the role. Contracts were signed and work began on the films in January 2008, with adaptations from Sidetracked, Firewall and One Step Behind.

Emmy-award-winning director Philip Martin was hired as lead director. Philip Martin worked with cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle to establish a visual style for the series. The two were keen to use the Red One digital camera, making Wallander the first British television series to do so. The second series was filmed from July to October 2009 and was broadcast between 3 January and 17 January 2010. The third series was filmed in the summer of 2011 in Ystad and Riga, Latvia, and aired from 8 July to 22 July 2012. Critics have written positively of the series, which has won a Broadcasting Press Guild Award (Best Actor for Kenneth Branagh) and 6 British Academy Television Awards, including Best Drama Series. However, Kenneth Branagh has announced that the BBC Wallander series will end with a final 3-episode fourth series. It will consist of an adaptation of The White Lioness and a 2-episode adaptation of Henning Mankell's final Inspector Wallander novel The Troubled Man.

Question: Which Swede writes the Inspector Wallender series of novels?
Answer: Henning Mankel